SECULAR SAINTS AND THEIR HAGIOGRAPHERS:

Historian's 'Duty': PR for Kerry?: What kind of a historian is Douglas Brinkley anyway? (Alex Beam, April 29, 2004, Boston Globe)

These days Brinkley is acting a lot less like a historian and a lot more like a PR flack for John Kerry, the subject of Brinkley's flattering bestseller "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War." Brinkley proclaims his independence from the Kerry campaign -- "This is my book, not his," he writes in "Tour" -- but he's become a major player in the Kerry agitprop machine.

On television, in magazines, and on Kerry's website, Brinkley functions as a dependable surrogate for the candidate, quick to testify to Kerry's unflinching qualities of heroism and leadership. "I don't quite see it that way," Brinkley says. "Yes, I think Kerry will make a good president, but this book could have gone either way. After Iowa, instead of going kinetic, the book might have been remaindered."

(Bias alert: I played a bit role in preparing the Globe's recently published "John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography," which differs significantly from Brinkley's authorized, triumphalist tome.)

In "Tour of Duty," Brinkley makes much of how Kerry shared all his Vietnam records, and of the extra research the author brought to the book. And yet, just a few months after publication, here are three examples of lazy puffery in Brinkley's tome.

Brinkley told the Atlantic magazine, which excerpted a portion of the book, that he interviewed "every single one" of John Kerry's crewmates on the so-called swift boats that Kerry captained in Vietnam. But in fact he did not interview crew member Steven Gardner, and -- surprise! -- Gardner turned out to be the only one of Kerry's crewmates who disliked his former commander. "I would have talked to Gardner, but I couldn't find him," Brinkley says now.

It gets worse. [...]

Brinkley and publisher William Morrow plan to release a revised edition of "Tour of Duty" in two weeks. "I started realizing, `I've got to fix this,' `I've got to fix that,' " Brinkley says. "Nobody believed we would get to this point where every aspect of the book is being dissected."

Call me old-fashioned, but I can remember a time when historians wrote books that didn't have to be revised after sitting on the shelf for just four months.

Can't be any more of a whitewash than McCullough on Truman, Goodwin on FDR or D'Souza on Reagan--two of them won Pulitzers. History, after all, is just politics by other means.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 1, 2004 7:34 AM